


Symbolic pop-cultural replication unit

by laughingpineapple



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Banter, Gen, Memes, Nerdiness, Post-Canon, on their way to fix a sore Diane-shaped void
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-12 22:06:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16880103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: Tammy Preston's impromptu Icelandic presentation on the power of stories, symbols, and memes, which are, after all, a form of connection between people. (Just kidding, she had a Gdoc on the ready. Tammy. Impromptu. Can you imagine)





	Symbolic pop-cultural replication unit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilacsigil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacsigil/gifts).



“Find me,” the note said. Albert took it out of his parka’s breast pocket and studied it again, keeping it safe in his cupped hands, protected from the cold gusts. Diane's chicken scratch, no doubt, blue ink on common lined notebook paper, crumpled after carrying it along from day he received it in Philly and throughout that whole subpolar wild goose chase.  _ Find me _ . He sighed. The Icelandic morning took his breath and pulled it upwards, in a thin white line that went on to join the veil of clouds above. He hoped that Diane was out there, somewhere, lighting herself a cigarette whose smoke would rise up join those same clouds. A lifeline, a faraway beacon.

The lights that lined the hotel's boardwalk still cast a vivid yellow light over the concrete slabs, giving the building a spectral glow against the ghastly morning sky. Good thing Albert had crossed an ocean to catch a ghost - to catch up with a ghost, to ask a ghost for forgiveness, to see that she was still alive and real and he was long past caring for  _ how _ \- and not to watch the Lights, at least the weather forecast hadn't yet managed to squash all his remaining hopes.

 

At the far end of the boardwalk, dark red hair glimmering against the morning sky like a substitute dawn, Tammy was posing at an invisible camera, or whatever it was that she did whenever social niceties didn't require her to keep all her limbs in check. Not that Albert could not relate, but the girl did take it a notch further than even Blue Rose standards. Right foot planted on the ground, left one raised on the first step leading to the lounge and arms firmly on hips, she stared into the distance with the poise of a fantasy heroine burdened by deep destinies.

“Who's filming, Preston?”

“Google Earth,” she shot back without missing a beat. “Always taking pictures.”

Albert laughed. The genuine deal. Sharp comeback, great timing, delivered with a cool professional voice that didn't tip its hand about whether what was coming was a stern talk about taxes, a shameless double entendre or anything in between. Perfect marks, if not for the fact that he'd seen or heard that line before somewhere.

“If you want to play the Mulder,” he countered, trusting his memory's image of that character dramatically posing on the steps of some cabin with that text badly edited on the still, “you are light years behind on your daily bullshit quota. What's it got for cryptids, Iceland, weird salmons? We haven't even seen a regular one. Get cracking.”

Tammy blinked. “That was Parks and Rec. How did you know it as Mulder? I'll have to re-evaluate your meme literacy, Agent Rosenfield.”

“Oh yeah? Which way?”

“That's classified.” She put on a tiny, constrained smile, treasuring their little back-and-forths. And good for her that she did, since she'd jumped in to join his hopeless search all on her own and had been stuck with a prickly codger for the better part of two weeks by then. Albert had been honored to be her mentor. He was glad to be her friend. “But now that you mention it, I should try watching some X-Files again.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of cheese?”

“Albert, Mulder and Scully have a 75% resolution rate. Seventy-five percent. Can you imagine that? Picture this, they face the unknown and they bring home  _ results _ .”

“And with the exception of bog-standard - if understandable - wish fulfillment, again I ask, what's that got to do with the price of cheese?”

“Actually,” she said with the utmost seriousness and a dramatic pause for added effect. “You'd be surprised.”

“Right now I'm really not.” Albert would have said he was amused, seeing her swan into her natural element as she pulled up a lavishly annotated spreadsheet on her phone and sent it to him. He would certainly be educated, shortly. Intrigued, at most. The surprise train, however, had left the station a few decades earlier, and this was really, really par for the Tammy course.

 

The spreadsheet was followed by a few pages of notes and several more of raw data exploring parallels between fictional narratives and real life. As Albert's eyebrow began to arch, Tammy rushed to explain that this phenomenon could not be quantified on a global scale - although, she noted, the recent concurrence of surreal TV and surreal political news broadcasts could make one wonder - but could be observed at a personal level. Noticing a pattern took someone with a genuine interest in scraping all manners of data off the internet, a quality which Tammy had demonstrated over and over through long, patient nights at her desk - and for which Albert was grateful, remembering full well what it was like to be the Blue Rose rookie and to be tasked with finding the needles in every goddamn haystack on federal soil. Tammy had always taken to those searches like a fish to water: no wonder her idea of a fun personal hobby to pursue in her free time was interpolating the world's fanciest, lace-hemmed tin hat. Not that her sales pitch wasn't convincing, in that charming way tin hats always are, out of sheer empirical evidence alone. There seemed to be something to Invitation to Love, at the very least, some intrinsic quality as persistent as that soap opera itself, that made reality go “hold my beer” and replicate within a day whatever ridiculous twist the writers had come up with for the latest episode. Correlation still sounded more plausible than causation from where Albert was standing, but the numbers were there and, all in all, life's inherent fuckery remained a constant and he wouldn't be as bold as to rule it off entirely. All in all, who knew.

Albert must have made a face when Tammy took great care to explain that “You find out a lot about people's lives on the internet”, a face of the “no shit, Sherlock” variety he would presume, because she froze like a deer caught with her hands in the cookie jar and promptly excused herself to go get coffee for the two of them so they could get moving.

 

He graciously accepted his coffee when she came back, thankful for the makeshift heat pack for his frozen hands more so than the caffeine proper.

“Now we're ready for the day,” he agreed, taking a sip. “But do go on explaining if you want to, Preston. I don't know what you are or are not onto, but the M.O. isn't worse than the rest of the team's back in the day. Have I ever told you about Gordon's ouija board?”

“Dozens of times. Still funny.”

“Phil's cigarette butts divination? To this day I'm almost sure he made it all up to mess with people, and by people I mean Gordon. How he predicted the chinchilla incident I'll never know.”

“That's news to me!” She buried her laughter in her coffee. “Please tell me all about it as soon  as we leave! But didn't you use to be the voice of reason? What happened to that Agent Rosenfield? I read reports that said you were the reason the blue rose had thorns.”

“Was that Earle? Sounds like Earle. Haven't we had  _ the talk _ about Agent Earle already?”

“Cooper, actually.” And suddenly she wished she could take it back. “Early days.”

“Same thing, then.” Albert shrugged. A wind rose, seeping into his bones. He retreated into his scarf. “What good did those thorns ever do.”

“Snatching Gordon back from the void?” She counted on her fingers. “Four times? That I know of?”

“Small blessings. Didn't stop the others. I strive to be rational, Tammy. It's a tall order when there's no rhyme nor reason to this world. What's  _ rational _ when you dream of your dear old friend, the one whom you shot to death and met again and saw disappear, and on the following day there's a blank envelope in your mail containing a note in her handwriting?”

“Whom we shot to death. We're here to find out. Together.” She shuffled her feet and eventually resolved to put a hand on his shoulder. Together. He could believe that. Tamara Preston had her own strong roots and would not disappear.

“Then go on, Mulder, make that top percentile count. I'm almost out of leads and open to suggestions. If you say we go to the movies, fuck it, we're going to the movies and hoping Iceland likes English dubs.”

 

She walked to the car and leaned on the door, long coat billowing in the wind with ethereal elegance. One day he'd have to ask if she put some thought into the logistics of her posing or if it just kept happening - had the wind gone the other way it would have been a disaster, but in the few years they'd been working together and, lately, occasionally drinking together, Albert could not remember so much as a wine stain marring her looks.

“I bought a movie last month,” she said, flipping through her phone's catalogue until she found a poster featuring an old man riding a lawnmower. “I am slowly making my way through what I'd missed of the Nineties. Then we flew out and I forgot all about it. It's called The Straight Story.” 

Albert snorted. “No parallels there.”

“Not our title, no. But it's about a long journey on the road as atonement, toward the reconciliation with an estranged loved one. Wanna give it a try?”

“On your phone? Get real, Tammy.” Mumbo jumbo was one thing but have some standards.

“You sound like Gordon.”

“Oh no.”

 

They drove out, past the hotel's low concrete silhouette and into the unknown. 

Far away, beyond the woods, Diane lit herself a cigarette and stared at the clouds.

 


End file.
